![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
emma_in_dream*Teleny, or the Reverse of the Medal* was published in a limited edition of 200 de luxe, carefully circulated copies in 1893. The care was essential as this is a work of gay porn.
The book is famously associated with Oscar Wilde. A bookseller claimed he had held a copy of the book for a round robin of authors including Oscar Wilde; Wilde’s publisher also sold a line of erotica, including *Teleny*.
One sees why people associate it with Wilde. The style is very reminiscent of *The Picture of Dorian Grey* (1890). It has the same hothouse atmosphere, the same scent of heliotrope, the same slender youths with lavender gloves and drooping dissipated eyelids. What it also has, of course, is lots of priaptic unions.
Cut for weird nineteenth-century porn.
And not very nice priaptic unions - cadaverous whores in grotesque lesbian unions, the rape of a servant, the rape and suicide of a servant, the mystical union of Teleny and Camille (both male), the consensual sodomisation of a man with a champagne bottle that then breaks (and then his suicide), and the betrayal of Camille when Teleny has sex with his mother.
The take away message of his book is that sex is bad, life is horrible, and that then you die.
A very grim book indeed.
I chose it because of the Wilde association, but I regret it.
The book is famously associated with Oscar Wilde. A bookseller claimed he had held a copy of the book for a round robin of authors including Oscar Wilde; Wilde’s publisher also sold a line of erotica, including *Teleny*.
One sees why people associate it with Wilde. The style is very reminiscent of *The Picture of Dorian Grey* (1890). It has the same hothouse atmosphere, the same scent of heliotrope, the same slender youths with lavender gloves and drooping dissipated eyelids. What it also has, of course, is lots of priaptic unions.
Cut for weird nineteenth-century porn.
And not very nice priaptic unions - cadaverous whores in grotesque lesbian unions, the rape of a servant, the rape and suicide of a servant, the mystical union of Teleny and Camille (both male), the consensual sodomisation of a man with a champagne bottle that then breaks (and then his suicide), and the betrayal of Camille when Teleny has sex with his mother.
The take away message of his book is that sex is bad, life is horrible, and that then you die.
A very grim book indeed.
I chose it because of the Wilde association, but I regret it.
